Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress. He is the best-selling author of "Apocalypse Never" and "San Fransicko" (HarperCollins, October 2021). "Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” says historian Richard Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “Within its lively pages, Michael Shellenberger rescues with science and lived experience a subject drowning in misunderstanding and partisanship. His message is invigorating: if you have feared for the planet’s future, take heart.” He has been called an “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the environmental humanist movement for his writings and TED talks, which have been viewed over five million times. Shellenberger advises policymakers around the world including in the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In January 2020, Shellenberger testified before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives. He has been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road. Shellenberger was invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2019 to serve as an independent Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, to be published in 2022 his most recent Congressional testimony on the state of climate science, mitigation, and adaptation. Shellenberger is a leading environmental journalist who has broken major stories on Amazon deforestation; rising climate resilience; growing eco-anxiety; the U.S. government’s role in the fracking revolution; and climate change and California’s fires. He also writes on housing and homelessness and has called for California to declare a state of emergency with regards to its addiction, mental health, and housing crises. He has authored widely-read articles and reports on the topic including “Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse,” “California in Danger.” His articles for Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and his TED talks ("How Fear of Nuclear Hurts the Environment," "Why I Changed My Mind About Nuclear Power" and “Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet”) have been viewed over six million times. Shellenberger was featured in "Pandora's Promise," an award-winning film about environmentalists who changed their minds about nuclear, and appeared on "The Colbert Report." He debated Ralph Nader on CNN’s "Crossfire" and Stanford University’s Mark Jacobsen at UCLA .  His research and writing have appeared in The Harvard Law and Policy Review, Democracy Journal, Scientific American, Nature Energy, PLOS Biology, The New Republic, and cited by the New York Times, Slate, USA Today, Washington Post, New York Daily News, The New Republic. Shellenberger has been an environmental and social justice advocate for over 25 years. In the 1990s he helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, and inspire Nike to improve factory conditions in Asia. In the 2000s, Michael advocated for a “new Apollo project” in clean energy, which resulted in a $150 billion public investment in clean tech between 2009 and 2015. He lives in Berkeley, California and travels widely.